Night-Bloom (37 page)

From the way he spoke, the prognosis was decidedly gloomy. Yet’, as Mooney listened, it occurred to him that horrendous as the story was, the man either didn’t grasp its full implication or else he didn’t seem to care. Further, he had the dim but growing suspicion that all of Watford’s talking, his compulsive spewing of words, hopping illogically from one subject to the next, was a stall to prevent him from getting down to the business for which he’d come.

“Mr. Watford?”

“They say we’ll have thunder showers tonight. We need it. Might break this awful humidity. You know, when I was a child my father—”

“Mr. Watford. I have a couple of questions I’d like to ask—”

“Questions?” His heart banged in his chest.
Oh, Christ. Oh, God.
“Look, I don’t know anything. Honest.”

Mystified, Mooney gazed at him. The man’s pallor was alarming. He’d gone white, the color of parchment, and his lips trembled.

He rattled on disjointedly. “I’m really not well. If you don’t believe me, ask Dr. Ramsay. He says I’ve only got a few months left, and now, now”—his eyes started to water unashamedly—“Now, they say I’ve been stealing medication. Stealing. Me. Can you imagine?”

“Look,” he said, clearing his throat, “I just wanted to ask a few more questions about that man who shared the room with you at Beth Israel two years ago.”

“What man?” Watford was momentarily bewildered. “Oh, him.”

“Yes. Remember, I already questioned you about him.”

“Oh, sure, that’s okay. Sure. Go ahead.” Watford giggled nervously.

Mooney pulled out his pad of scribbled notes. “Two weeks ago you said this Mr. Boyd—”

“Boyd?”

“That’s his name.”

“The man in the bed next to me? In the hospital?”

“That’s right. Only you said you didn’t recall that name.”

“Yes,” Watford said and his eyes glowed. Then, just as quickly his expression drooped. “I still don’t. He was sort of a strange fellow.”

“Strange? In what way?”

Having revealed the fact that the man was strange, Watford was at a loss to elucidate the precise quality of that strangeness. Mooney attempted to help him. “Did he look strange? His appearance, I mean?”

“No. It wasn’t that. He was sort of nice-looking. Pleasant, actually.”

“Pleasant?” Mooney scribbled, recalling Baum’s theory of the murderous God-fearing chap in the gray flannels. “How old, would you say?”

“Fifty. Sixty. I don’t know.”

Mooney repeated the words beneath his breath as he scribbled onto the page. Dr. Kurt Baum’s silhouette came more sharply into focus.

“Was there anything special about him? Distinctive?”

Watford thought a moment. By that time he wanted genuinely to help. “No. I don’t believe so. There was nothing especially distinctive. Hey, what do you want this guy for, anyway? What did he do?”

“He’s killed a few people.”

“Oh.” Watford nodded. His response to the information was one of almost astonishing indifference. He reflected a moment longer. “Gosh, he seemed awfully nice to me. How do you know?”

“I don’t. I’ve got a pretty good hunch though. I’m trying to locate the guy. That’s why I came to see you.”

Watford smiled dreamily.

To Mooney the man’s smile appeared to reflect a harmless idiocy, yet he was clearly the key to everything. “Can you give me a physical description of the man? Was he tall or short?”

“Tall. At least he appeared to be. He was lying down all the time. Under sheets. Didn’t I give you all this already?”

“Yeah, but what the hell—give it to me again. How tall would you say? Six feet?”

“Sure—he could’ve been six feet.”

“Could’ve been?” Mooney wore a face of despair. “That’s right. And thin. He looked thin. Actually a little sickly, but he’d lost a lot of blood. And, like I said, pleasant-looking. A teacher or a musician or something. He didn’t look like any killer, if you know what I mean.”

Mooney scribbled. “If you saw the guy in a lineup or a photograph, you think you could identify him?”

“Sure,” Watford nodded excitedly. “Sure I could.”

“You told me before that the guy said he’d had some kind of accident. An open manhole or something?”

“That’s right. He’d been walking in the street, he said, and the utility people had quit work for the night and gone off and left the manhole cover off. I told the guy I would have sued for a million.”

“And the guy fell through the hole, you say?” Mooney pressed harder. “Did you ever think the guy was lying? That maybe he got injured some other way?”

Watford stared blankly back at him. “Nope.”

“Where was his injury? Do you recall?”

“I think I told you the first time you came to see me. It was his leg. Took thirty-two stitches to close him up.”

His string of questions run out, Mooney experienced a small rush of desperation. “Was he discharged before or after you?”

Watford had a ghastly recollection of himself in physician’s gown, lunging down a corridor, the thud of footsteps in pursuit, hoarse angry shouts bellowing from behind. The last question had reignited his terrifying suspicion. Suddenly he was antagonistic. “How come you need to know all this?”

Mooney reared back slightly, a light whistling noise issuing from his nose. “I’d just like to know if anyone came while you were there. Did he have visitors?”

“No. There were no visitors.”

“You’re certain?”

“Of course I’m certain. I was there, wasn’t I?”

“Okay, okay. Don’t go getting all hot and bothered. I’m just trying to get some additional facts.”

“I’m sick,” Watford whined at the detective as if he were responsible for the condition. But in the next instant, he was apologetic and a little frightened. “I’m sick, you see. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve got filariasis. Bancroftian filariasis. Picked it up in the army. In ‘Nam.”

Mooney’s head tilted sideways. “I thought you said you had leukemia.”

“That’s what they tell me. But I don’t believe them. They’re all liars. I’m sure this is a relapse of my filariasis.”

Something in the man’s eyes at that moment caused the detective to set his pencil down. “Why would they lie to you?”

“They do that in hospitals,” Watford confided in a whisper. “They’re trained to lie. Particularly if you’re a veteran. The government doesn’t want to pay the benefits, you see.”

“Yeah, I see.” Mooney’s spirit sagged. He was just about ready to rip out all the pages of Watford’s deposition and tear them in shreds. They were the ramblings of a madman. “Well, I guess that’s all the questions I’ve got. In case your memory sparks, you know where to find me.”

“You gave me your number the last time we spoke.”

Mooney scribbled his office and home numbers onto the pad, then tore out the page. He lay it down on the night table beside Watford. “Just in case something comes to mind.”

“Sure,” Watford cried eagerly. “Sure. I’ll call. I’d love to see you get this guy. He sure didn’t look like any killer to me.”

Mooney had a final impression of the man lying in bed in his gown. With his wide, staring, childlike face, he seemed pathetic and unbearably alone. “I hope you feel better soon.” He took the cool, smooth palm in his hand.

For a terrible moment Watford clung to the hand and wouldn’t let it go. “Listen,” he said, “I didn’t do anything wrong. Honest.”

The light in the room was bright but Watford’s vision was dim and hazy. He’d had his eggs and toast and juice and the nurses, following Dr. Ramsay’s directions, had given him his morning allotment of Demerol.

Now, as was always the case after taking the drug, he was drowsy and wanted to sleep. Several nurses moved about the room on gummed soles that squeaked over the vinyl tile floors. They were straightening up, changing sheets on the bed beside Watford’s, where a man just operated on for bleeding ulcers lay with a plastic hose inserted into his vein. From time to time a bubble of glucose slid audibly down the tube into his arm.

Knowing that Watford liked to drift off watching TV, the nurse had put the set on softly so he might watch the morning talk shows without disturbing his neighbor.

Through drowsy, heavy-lidded eyes, Watford watched the blue-green cathode phantoms floating eerily above him, their voices coming at him over long, cold distances. On the screen he watched an ambulance and police cars and then several men lugging a heavy canvas bag between them to a waiting van.

The television reporter, a pert, all-American girl, stood in the foreground with morning breezes lashing wisps of hair about her face. In breathy, portentous whispers, she explained what had occurred there. It appeared that someone had broken into an art gallery somewhere uptown. Burglar alarms had gone off. Thieves or a single thief, she couldn’t be certain (Watford’s eyes were nearly closed now and he listened with only one ear), had been interrupted by the police during the act. When asked to surrender, they, or he (they couldn’t say if there were more than one), refused, trying instead to escape. One was subsequently killed.

“Quintius,” the pert young thing murmured breathlessly. “Mr. Peter Quintius … owner of … father of … internationally renowned collector … dealer. When notified at his Long Island estate last night …”

Watford turned drowsily on his pillow and gazed blankly at the screen. Between the moist cage of his lashes he saw for a moment a face. It was strikingly handsome in a haggard way. Full of some ageless dignifying sorrow.

The face hovered unsteadily on the screen before Watford’s woozy vision. A voice, hoarse, broken with grief, replied numbly to questions. Then, like some troubled wraith, was gone.

Watford’s eyes had opened fully by then, still focused upon an afterimage that persisted, even as the bright, perky mask of the reporter had reoccupied the screen, signing herself off and transferring the show back to the studio.

Watford had a slightly baffled feeling, like a man jarred rudely out of deep sleep. He had no idea why he continued to watch the screen expectantly. In the next moment he shrugged, rolled over and fell soundly asleep.

Late the next afternoon one of the nurses brought him a newspaper. It was her own copy of the
Daily News
which she delivered to him unfailingly each day. Watford loved the
Daily News.
It embodied for him some vestige of his childhood when, as a small boy, he looked forward each Sunday to the comic strips—Dick Tracy, Popeye, Gasoline Alley—although most of the old strips were gone now and what remained lacked the color and engaging good spirits of the old favorites.

He read slowly from one page to the next, his mouth lipping words as he read, stories about small, unheroic wars in distant places, labor strife, sordid little page 4 stories reeking of treachery and deceit—a paternity suit involving a cinema star; the body of a numbers runner found pulped and bloody in the trunk of a car in Staten Island; a Long Island heiress who drove an ice pick into the heart of her philandering husband. Watford devoured everything on the page. As always he experienced a sharp twinge of affinity for the victims and losers. Next was a story about a young man shot to death attempting to break into a prominent uptown gallery. “… the victim identified as 26-year-old William Quintius, paradoxically the son of the …”

“Peter Quintius,” Watford uttered the name aloud without reaction. Inset was a photograph of Mr. Quintius himself at the crime site being questioned by the police.

“Peter Quintius.” He murmured the words once more under his breath, then vaguely, he recalled the television news early that morning, the pretty young reporter standing before the gallery, interviewing the tall, dignified gentleman, caught that moment full-face by the camera. A stricken, disheveled figure beleaguered by reporters.

“Peter Quintius,” he said once more, and in his mind’s eye he saw a face. It lay propped on a pillow in three-quarter view surmounted by a crown of thick, white hair, partially eclipsed in shadow.

“What’s your name?” he heard himself ask. The face turned laboriously toward him on the pillow. The large eyes fluttered open.

“Boyd,” came the hoarse reply. “My name is Anthony Boyd.” Not Quintius. It was Boyd. Just as the police had said. “My name is Anthony Boyd.” Unable to believe, yet unable to discount, he repeated the name over and over, like a man trying to shake something sticky and unpleasant from his hand.

My God. How strange. Watford reread the story, pity welling up within him for the man he’d known only briefly in a hospital room two years before. The son killed like that, breaking into his own father’s place of business. And the father having to come down. Making the identification and all that. Imagine the shame. The pity of it. His own son. My God. It’s him, all right. That’s him. A. Boyd. A. Boyd. Not P. Quintius. A. Boyd.

He laughed to himself, then suddenly broke off, recalling the detective who had come to him. Just two days ago. How strange. How come I couldn’t recall then? It was the face. Seeing the face like that. How strange. My God. I’ve got to call. I’ve got to get in touch with that policeman, what’s his name? He snatched at the strip of paper. His eyes swam over the letters. “Mooney.” That’s it. Captain Mooney. My God, I’ve got to call.